Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Child Dies From Wild Dogs’ Attack

An eight-year-old boy, Tomas Jay Henio, was attacked and killed by nine feral dogs on Wednesday, Dec. 26.A representative from the Ramah Navajo Police Department confirmed the incident. According to the Cibola County Sheriff’s Office,
Henio went outside and minutes later his mom went to check on him only
find her child face down, unresponsive, with bite marks on his body. The Albuquerque Journal reported this past weekend that Henio was the oldest of four children. All nine dogs were captured on Thursday, Dec. 27, by two county sheriff
animal control officers and were delivered to an official at the Grants
Animal Care Center at approximately 6 p.m. They were all euthanized that
evening, according to Mace. The incident was on Navajo Nation land and the Gallup FBI office,
according to Ramah Navajo Police Department Sgt. Delvin Maria, is now
handling the case. Feral dogs in Cibola County are a problem. In 2011 Kevin Gleason, Navajo Nation wildlife and
animal control manager, reported that there were four-to-five dogs for
each of the more than 89,000 households – or as many as 445,000 dogs,
most of which roam unchecked, killing livestock and biting people with
alarming regularity. There are several parts of Cibola County that belong
to the Navajo Nation. One part is the Pinehill area, where the incident
took place last week. In Pinehill, stray dogs roam the sides of highways, store parking lots and just about anywhere they find food. “They [feral dogs] kill everything,” Gleason was
reported saying by the Associated Press in a Colorado newspaper. “Cats,
dogs, cattle, sheep, horses… We just had a case where a man lost 37
sheep to a pack of dogs.” Officers responded to more than 25 bite cases a month, said Gleason. And, 25 livestock damage cases a month. Feral dogs mauled a 55-year-old man in 2011 after he
fell down from a seizure. Following the incident, Gleason said, his
department went in and removed 79 dogs [from the area where the man was
killed]. “And it looked like we never touched it,” he added...more